McGill and Concordia students held a rally Wednesday against the tuition hikes, jeering at the premier in his office opposite McGill.
Updates from March, 2024 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
Only 19 fines (TVA says it’s 20) have been issued by the city’s vaunted Airbnb squad over eight months. They’re having difficulty proving that addresses are not the owners’ primary residence.
This is being mentioned now as the anniversary of the fatal fire in Old Montreal approaches. Relatives of the victims are said to be frustrated at the slowness of the investigation: no one has been arrested and no one can say whether charges will be laid against the owner.
Ian
Nice work if you can get it, I guess. 19 fines over 8 months, the mind boggles.
To quote the Simpsons, “That’s some good work, Lou.”
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Kate
Modern Farmer – I read ’em all, folks – looks with approval on Montreal’s urban agriculture.
Nicholas
I make “I read ’em all” jokes every so often and no one ever gets the reference. We’re a dying breed.
JP
What’s the joke in reference to? I tried to look it up but didn’t find anything.
Nicholas
The Gazoo had a gossip column by the pseudonymous “Doug Camilli”, whose photo was the back of someone’s head. He covered local stuff and celebrity gossip mostly, and you assumed he read the major papers during these pre-internet days, but sometimes there’d be a funny story from, say, Omaha about a Darwin Award or whatever, that wouldn’t be covered in the big papers (maybe he heard it on a late night show, or Peter Anthony Holder’s The Stuff Files, though he probably saw them on the wire), and he would write, “A local chef, reports the Omaha World-Herald (I read ’em all)…”, jokingly referring to how he hears about all this random local trivia. Column was retired in 2016.
Kate
Nicholas, I think it’s older than that, I have a feeling it’s originally an American catchphrase, earlier than Sarah Palin’s claim when asked what news sources she read, but I haven’t been able to find out whose.
Nicholas
I’m pretty sure I remember the phrase in those columns in the 90s, but maybe it was the early 00s, but it was definitely before Palin was a known name; I remember asking about it before mid-2007, and I know the date based on the person I asked, but it was likely a decade or so earlier. I have found a few recent uses in various Canadian media that specifically use it in this way (specifically referring to an obscure publication that they definitely don’t read regularly), but can’t find anything else other than the Gazette, though I don’t have a newspaper database. Some American examples I found are not the same, but meant in a more literal sense, referring to being well read by reading all the major publications. Also here is a Quebec Press Council decision from 1981 about a Camilli column, to at least date the column. And, of course, the reference is now circular, as this post and a reference about it are now appearing as top hits!
MarcG
Not sure if this link will work but you can search the Gazette via BANQ and there’s a Camilli column from 1980 where he uses it: https://www.proquest.com/docview/2199930761/D26CB00061224A49PQ/10?accountid=8612&sourcetype=Historical%20Newspapers.
Josh
Doug Camilli, by the way, was Brian Kappler, who was a reporter and editor at the Gazette for ages. He spoke to a j-school class I was in at Concordia ~25 years ago.
PatrickC
@Josh, thanks. I often wondered who “Doug Camilli” was.
Nicholas
Thanks all for the extra info.
I emailed him and he confirmed that he believes he coined it himself. And the column from MarcG definitely puts it very early. It’s fun to know that even though few people recognize it, it permeated Anglo Montreal enough that Kate was able to use it in its correct, irreverent use without having known the source.
Kate
Wow. Original research!
I admit I was sure it harked back to the era of writers like Robert Benchley and James Thurber.
MarcG
You can search the New York Times from September 18, 1851 to December 31, 2002 here and there are no results for the phrase.
Nicholas
He also added a great tidbit, showing we’re in good company:
>The phrase’s finest hour came around 2005. Remember the Gomery Commission, into Jean Chretien’s sponsorship scandal? Gomery was a Montrealer, and one day – I forget the context – he cited some obscure data point from somewhere and said “like Doug Camilli, ‘I read ‘em all!’ “
Joey
I think Josh and I were in the same class, because I remember Brian came one evening to give a talk and introduced himself by turning around and asking if anyone recognized the back of his head. I think I once heard that the Doug Camili column was written by committee. As a kid I was convinced that the Important Persons Act was real.
Joey
According to Google Ngram, the phrase “I read ’em all” (without the “folks”) peaked in popularity by a wide margin in 1934: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=I+read+’em+all&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
Blork
Doug Camilli is my reference for “I read ‘em all, folks,” which I still use about once a month somewhere or other (including here a few weeks ago IIRC).
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Kate
The city is dreaming up a brand new tram network and the mayor says it isn’t a pipe dream.
P
I’d take 15km of pink line over 150km of trams.
Ian
The mayor says a lot of stuff. I’ll believe it when it’s actually ready to go.
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Kate
As it writes an updated PMAD for next year, the agglomeration wants to boost densification, especially along metro and REM lines, but the people proposing this are up against a lot of resistance from town and borough mayors.
su
“La CMM propose ainsi d’exiger une densité de 450 logements par hectare au centre-ville de Montréal, alors que le seuil était de 150 logements par hectare jusqu’à maintenant. Pour les quartiers de banlieue dotés d’une gare du REM, le seuil passerait de 80 à 200.”
Yikes…serious crowding coming up.Nicholas
Remember that that is the maximum on any plot, not the what will be seen the entire area. The Plateau averages 70 dwellings per hectare, but that includes commercial, parks, etc. Just removing the big parks brings it to about 80 dwellings per hectare, and removing the roads raises it even more. Some rough math shows that 150 dwellings per acre would look like Plateau triplexes, 200 is fourplexes. There are lots of ways to do this density, and it can be the ten storey buildings we see built in the inner suburbs now that include a ton of landscaping, or it can be mixes of 2-5 storeys with tiny yards and balconies that we traditionally built. And that’s just what zoning allows: not everything will get built, and not in the next 5 years.
I’m sure we can handle 2-5 storeys near a metro or REM (and towers downtown). The only question is will the inner suburbs allow the traditional development pattern that most Montrealers love, or only towers surrounded by landscaping due to zoning requirements of setbacks, lot coverage, parking and other things that make it soulless.
Kate
I had a comic interlude in my head just now when I walked into my kitchen and imagined three people sitting there saying “We live here too now because of densification” and waiting for me to make them coffee, because this neighbourhood is within hailing distance of Jarry metro.
But nobody is seriously proposing that existing, functional housing be taken down, only that new housing going up should be bigger and higher than we’re used to. This is how Montreal island eventually becomes Hong Kong.
I’m divided on this. In a theoretical sense I understand the need for densification and I want it to happen, but aesthetically, I don’t want to live in or among a lot of high rises. If that makes me a snob, too bad. I’m not wealthy, it’s not that I want to live in a standalone house somewhere, but I do like a triplex flat with a tiny yard.
walkerp
Replace the roads with housing.
Ian
Plus think of all the money you’ll save on firetrucks and ambulances if emergency vehicles have no way to access your vesion of the Kowloon Walled City. It might even offset the higher prices of your groceries since nothing can be shipped in except by foot.
bob
There is an antonym for density: blight.
Joey
Hong Kong’s population is four times the size of Montreal’s. Its density is 1.4 times that of Montreal. (Source: google search top result, FWIW.)
If the starting point in the conversation is not even that we don’t *want* to become Hong Kong but that zoning for higher density (not the same as mandating minimum density or destroying existing neighbourhoods en masse to replace them with towers) will *lead us* to be Hong Kong-sized is how NIMBYism gets good ideas killed before they can even be considered.
Ian
Getting rid of all roads is not a good idea.
Kate
Joey, I’m not trying to do a scare tactic mentioning Hong Kong. It’s just, name a city that’s on an island and is building high rises…
Nicholas
Remember that a city or borough could limit housing to four stories, include roads and sidewalks and alleys and parks and businesses, and satisfy the requirements of this. The reason we have soulless towers is because single family homes take up so much space we have to overcompensate with towers on the few places with no neighbours to complain. KWC would be like 10,000 units per hectare; this is 200 (one-fiftieth).
And it’s worth being clear that there could, and should, be functional housing that’s replaced by new, denser housing. Take a look at the areas near the blue line extension: there are tons of backyard pools. I’m not saying we should force people from their homes, but that we give people the option to build a four storey apartment building on their own property when it’s within walking distance of a metro or REM station. I used to live underneath a 99-year old who lived in the house his father built, and my rent helped him keep his home in retirement. I just want people in St Leonard or Pointe Claire or Brossard to have that option. The island could have the density of the Plateau and fit over 6 million people. We’ve got a long way to go before we get to Hong Kong.
DeWolf
I know this is a digression but Hong Kong is sometimes used as a boogeyman by people who’ve never been there and it couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m in Hong Kong right now — a suburb of Hong Kong about 20km by train from the city centre — and I’m sitting in a high-rise flat listening to birds chirping in the trees just outside the window. The train station is 100 metres away. There are countless shops and restaurants within a 10 minute walk, several parks and two public markets that are roughly the size of Atwater or Jean-Talon. And this isn’t even a sea of high-rises: the buildings across the street are two and three storeys. Meanwhile, I can walk 30 minutes in nearly any direction and find myself in a completely wild country park, because Hong Kong’s built density has allowed 40% of the land area to be protected by parks.
Montreal already has a lot of good medium density housing. That should be the baseline. But can someone tell me why we are still building three storey buildings on the vacant lots that exist on the Plateau, instead of 5-6 storey buildings? It wouldn’t be out of character with the neighbourhood but it would add a lot more housing supply.
And there is absolutely no reason why there should be detached single-family housing within 1km of any metro or REM station. The fact that there are enclaves of bungalows (protected by law!) next to about a dozen different metro stations is irresponsible land management on so many different levels.
CE
Even when I was studying planning at Concordia–a planning school that certainly wasn’t teaching parking minimums and highway design–I’d come up against a lot of anti-density arguments. One example I remember was this building on Laurier in the Plateau. The majority of students and even the prof felt it was out of scale for the street and neighbourhood. I was one of the few people who felt it worked well for the space and was a perfect spot for higher density housing. This attitude is why new buildings right in the centre of the city look like this or this when they should look more like the buildings on Laurier.
Kevin
We could get way more density if we eliminated the building code requirement for two stairwells in every building.
Canada has the most restrictive code *in the entire world* and it is a major factor in making our housing so expensive. It means that every building above two stories requires two staircases–which means that every apartment building or condo is built like a hotel. It leads to massive amounts of wasted space and makes it extremely expensive to build two or three bedroom apartments.
And there is *no* evidence that it makes any high rise any safer. It’s just typical Canadian “move the goalposts” regulation for the sake of regulation.
Kate
DeWolf, it isn’t a digression. I cited HK without really considering it – think of places where a lot of very tall residential buildings stand on an island, and it comes to mind, for me anyway, even if it’s not entirely fair. Thank you for sorting me out on that.
DeWolf
@Kevin — I take it you watched Uytae Lee’s recent video about this? I think Montreal is a bit of an exception to what he described because outdoor staircases are allowed here, even in large buildings, so it’s really not a big deal to have two staircases. From what I can tell, most other cities in Canada require all staircases to be internal. The real problem here is that buildings above three floors require an elevator, which adds a lot of cost to the 5/6-storey buildings that would be ideal in many situations.
@Kate — Hong Kong does take things to an extreme and its particular form of urban planning really doesn’t translate to anywhere else, except in the broadest sense of it being pretty transit-oriented. But like Manhattan, it’s a place where very high density does not necessarily translate to poor quality of life. I’d reckon an elderly person in Hong Kong has a better life than an elderly person in most parts of Montreal because the density allows for so much more accessibility to basic goods and services, not to mention transit and community (eg gathering spaces in nearby parks). Very old people in HK lead pretty active lives in comparison to their counterparts in North America.
Kevin
@DeWolf
No, I confess I’ve never heard of that person.
In recent years I’ve been doing a lot of reading about why so many newer high-rises in Canada are full of single-bedroom units instead of multi-bedroom units, and that was one idea that stuck with me — and a developer I know confirmed that he had been unable to sell multi-bedroom units in a highrise because they ended up being so large, and so expensive, that a house in the ‘burbs was about half the price.DeWolf
Okay, just a coincidence then! It’s a good video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRdwXQb7CfM&ab_channel=AboutHere
The same holds true for most high-rises in Montreal, but not necessarily smaller buildings, which tend to have plex-style layouts or courtyards that allow for windows on both sides and a layout more amenable to having multiple bedrooms. There are some high-rises exceptions too. Check out Phase 1 of Laurent & Clark which provides its second staircase via an outdoor corridor.
JaneyB 10:00 on 2024-03-14 Permalink
The premier has an office opposite McGill? I didn’t know this. Now the protest location makes more sense.
Those protests are going nowhere without the support of the UdeM and UQAM. Legault is very canny to divide and conquer like this. He has nothing to lose by going ahead with his plan.
Kate 10:16 on 2024-03-14 Permalink
I was just thinking that, JaneyB. There’s no coverage of this story in franco media because it isn’t an issue there at all. The issue doesn’t touch the UdeM or UQAM and yes, the universities have been divided and conquered.
CE 11:09 on 2024-03-14 Permalink
Are the numbers of Francophone students from the ROC studying at Quebec universities so marginal that it isn’t an issue for them? I would think there are quite a few Acadians and Franco Ontarians at Laval, U de M, and the Université de Québec schools, but maybe not enough for anyone to care? These tuition hikes affect them just as much as an English speaking student from Alberta who wants to study at McGill. It seems to me that this government would have a stake in trying to attract these Francophone students to study, live, and work here.
Kate 11:20 on 2024-03-14 Permalink
CE, the hike only applies to English-language universities, although Bishop’s has been spared. This item explains. So it’s basically a way to administer a burn specifically to McGill and Concordia.
Also, while students from France and Belgium get to come here cheap, students from francophone Africa do not. I haven’t got chapter and verse on that, though.
CE 11:29 on 2024-03-14 Permalink
Ah ok, I thought it applied to all universities.
GC 12:39 on 2024-03-14 Permalink
I thought that, too, CE. Either way, in practice it targets English ones more because they (I assume) have the lion’s share of the out-of-province students. I just thought the French schools were on board because it’s a net benefit to them. I.e., the transfer payments from the English schools would offset any drop from out-of-province francophones. And it also wouldn’t be the first time that the Quebec government acted somewhat indifferent to non-Quebecois Canadian francophones.
Somewhere along the way, I also missed (or forgot) the news that Bishops was exempt. That just makes it even more blatant that it’s an attack on Montreal’s English schools. SIGH.
Kate, does the article you linked actually spell out that it’s specific to English schools? It mentions Bishops being exempt, but its actually a bit vague about whether or not it would apply to French schools.
Kate 12:42 on 2024-03-14 Permalink
Here’s a CP piece: “The Quebec government is hiking tuition to $12,000 a year and imposing a French-language requirement for out-of-province students at English universities.”
I don’t have time just now to dig up the legal wording but I’ll see what I can do.
GC 13:09 on 2024-03-14 Permalink
Thanks. I’m not doubting that you are correct and I was mistaken. I’m sure you’ve read many more articles about it than I have. I just thought that Global piece was vague about it. It was a criticism of Global and not you, Kate.
Kate 14:03 on 2024-03-14 Permalink
GC, no worries. I wanted to find out too whether I’d misunderstood the law but no, the hike only applies to English universities.
At least one challenge being brought is that it’s prejudicial, since it only attacks the universities operating in a specific language, and a lot may turn on how exactly the law is worded. But I can’t find it, as I don’t know what the bill number was.
Kevin 14:37 on 2024-03-14 Permalink
There is no law imposing this prejudicial tuition hike– it’s just a ministerial decree
And the French universities don’t support it because they know it’s just hurting Montreal and they won’t see any significant financial benefit
it https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/editoriaux/2024-02-22/financement-universitaire/ajouter-de-l-eau-au-lieu-de-faire-des-vagues.php
GC 16:14 on 2024-03-14 Permalink
This Gazette piece (from about two weeks after the initial announcement) is also pretty vague: https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/analysis-how-quebec-tuition-overhaul-targets-bishops-concordia-and-mcgill. So, I think some of the confusion comes from the way the media reported it. AND that Déry was ambiguous, herself, as quoted in that article.
There are at least three provisions, though, right?
1) An increase in tuition to out-of-province students. (Which I thought applied to all schools, but effectively only applies to McGill and Concordia since Bishop’s is exempt.)
2) Changes to how the tuition is redistributed to the francophone universities. My understanding is that this transfer is not new, but they are just increasing the percentage that flows from the English schools to the French schools?
3) That the students that come in study in English will be required to prove some level of French mastery by the end of their studies. This seems the least contentious one to me, on the surface, but I think it’s still ambiguous how it will work in execution. I.e., if the student fails to prove this…then what? Their degree is not granted? They need to keep paying tuition until they can prove it?
CE 17:48 on 2024-03-14 Permalink
I really can’t see the government getting away with this if it only applies to two universities. What argument can you make against the hikes not being discriminatory? If it applied to out-of-province students across the board (at all Quebec universities) there could be no argument for discrimination. I can only imagine the CAQ’s reaction (and the lawsuits) if tuition was hiked at Université de Moncton but kept the same price at UNB, St. Thomas, and Mount Allison.
Ian 20:05 on 2024-03-14 Permalink
It doesn’t matter, Québecois nationalists threw Francophones from the ROC under the bus a long time ago in favour of consolidating their power. Despite big talk from festivals like Francophonie there is no political brotherhood between Quebec and the rest of the Nouvelle France diaspora.